Congratulations to Keigan for scoring in the 95.5th percentile on his STAT university entrance exam!

Want to schedule tuition or a project meeting? Please use the new Availability Schedule as a guide to see my whereabouts on a given day.

Pictures from Frankston's 2018 Big Picture Fest! Click HERE to see the album.

LiquidFractal is pleased to host the Complex Processes Research Group at Swinburne University! Click HERE for more information.

This site is always evolving, and your opinion matters! Please post your thoughts and feedback in the Suggestions forum.

Welcome to LiquidFractal.

LiquidFractal offers professional English tutoring, technical writing, proofreading, and editing services, as well as a community of individuals interested in the fun and stimulating exchange of ideas. View the slides for more information!

High-calibre English Tutoring

Open up new possibilities for learning with professional tutoring in grammar, vocabulary, essay writing, literary studies, philosophy and theory...all with the help of an awarded, published English Ph.D. based in the Melbourne suburbs. I am familiar with the official VCAA literature list for the English VCE.

Professional Technical Writing

Balance word and image with an experienced Instructional Designer who has written documentation for Fortune 500 companies and government departments. I can decipher, document and describe your product to a wider audience.

Editing and Proofreading

As a published writer who has edited and proofread everything from high-school essays to philosophy journals, doctoral dissertations and books, I will help you craft your document or project into a sophisticated and graceful argument or presentation.

Join Our Community

LiquidFractal is pleased to offer discussion forums, blogs and media galleries to serve a growing community of people interested in the fun and interesting exchange of ideas. Have a reading group? Host it here for free. Nerds welcome!

Sign In

Welcome to LiquidFractal!

You've reached the official website of LiquidFractal, which offers high-calibre English tutoring, technical writing, and professional proof-reading and editing services.

Registering for a free account has many benefits. For one, you get rid of this welcome message! But you also get access to forums and other areas of the site which are hidden from guest view.

The About tab has more information on the site's concept, history, and mission statement. The FAQs will tell you everything you want to know. The Content tab is where you'll find forums, blogs, and media. Check out the Site News & Information blog for the most recent news about site development - new functions, how to use them, etc.

If you're a Tutor Client, please click Create Account to register on the site (if you haven't already), then send me a Private Message to let me know so I can upgrade your account and set up your Learning Domains.

If you're a Reading/Research Group member, student or scholar, please register on the site and send me a Private Message so I can add you to the appropriate group.

To contact the site owner please click Contact below, or register/sign in and send me a Private Message.

Featured Topics

Dear members of the complex processes research group,
The next meeting of the group on the theme of saving the environment from neoliberalism will feature:
SPEAKER: Cristina Neesham, Swinburne Business School
TOPIC: Adam Smith and the Modern Business School
TIME: 12.30pm, Wednesday, 23rd May
VENUE: AGSE301
Abstract:
This presentation focuses on how business schools have adopted and applied the economic and moral-philosophical ideas of Adam Smith, and on the implications of these distortions for business education today. Using examples of genealogical studies (such as, the history of Marx’s concept of necessary class conflict as derived from Smith’s theory of social order), I critique the still dominant myth that neoliberalism (especially as reflected in the work of free-market theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman) is a natural ‘offspring’ of Smith’s economic thought. More specifically, I argue that, when similar assumptions about the ‘mechanics’ of the market are combined with profoundly different theories of social order, human nature, and the social meaning of value (as derived from economic activity), this results in profoundly different, and not similar, economic theories. Having mapped the trajectory of several Smithian ideas from his time to ours, I conclude that Smith’s work has more in common with Marx (especially in his early writings), with Sen (and his direction of development economics) and with social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt than with von Hayek and Friedman. Based on this conclusion, I propose a manifesto for a new business education curriculum, aimed at deconstructing the narrow ideological co-optations operated by neoliberalist doctrines and at recovering the richness of Smith’s economic and moral-philosophical thought to support new, different understandings of socially responsible business activity.

Hi everyone,
I've been accepted to teach a summer school course at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy (MSCP) beginning Monday 15 Jan. 2018 and going for two hours each Monday for five weeks.
The course is called "Schelling and 'Philosophical Psychology'," and you can read the description here: https://mscp.org.au/courses/summer-school-2018#course1

Sublation [Aufhebung], as I understand it, is Hegel's term for the process by which a state is "raised up," or cancelled out into a new, higher state of being. So in Hegel's system, history unfolds as an optimistic, progressive movement toward the revelation of absolute spirit in the world. It's a kind of optimism that been co-opted (knowingly or not) by all sorts of groups in contemporary culture - from those of us who think science is progressively discovering more and more about the world and will ultimately explain everything[1] to people who think that humanity is just getting better and that the world is generally improving (the "up and to the right" thinkers, as they say in economics). In other words, history is a progression from state to (higher) state without looking back - "without remainder."
But Hegel adds a wrinkle to Aufhebung which not everyone acknowledges. In the Science of Logic Hegel is very clear about it however:
The German “aufheben” (“to sublate” in English) has a twofold meaning in the language: it equally means “to keep,” “to ‘preserve’,” and “to cause to cease,” “to put an end to.” Even “to preserve” already includes a negative note, namely that something, in order to be retained, is removed from its immediacy and hence from an existence which is open to external influences. – That which is sublated is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing for that. – These two definitions of “to sublate” can be cited as two dictionary meanings of the word. But it must strike one as remarkable that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. For speculative thought it is gratifying to find words that have in themselves a speculative meaning.[2]
So sublation is a speculative term for Hegel, which means that it "disputes itself." Thus, when something is sublated it is not annulled or cancelled out; it remains as an element in the new state, which means that there can never be a clean break between states. Hegel may arbitrarily posit a linear progression from A to B to C etc., but this can never be guaranteed because of the very mechanism of sublation he uses.
Footnotes
^ I think this includes people who think we are free to pollute the planet as much as we want because, hey, by the time the Earth becomes uninhabitable we'll just build huge spaceships and go off to colonize other planets Battlestar-Galactica style!
^ G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 81-82.